Bombay Before Bollywood by Thomas Rosie

Author:Thomas, Rosie [Thomas, Rosie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438456775
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2015-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.4 Jahan Ara (1964) lobby card for the movie theatres. An historical starring Mala Sinha, Prithviraj Kapoor and Bharat Bhushan.

Source: Courtesy Tasveer Ghar.

So why were the Arabian Nights such a compelling vehicle for Indian film-makers? Homi Wadia gives us some important clues: the Nights’ licensed grandeur and unpredictable storylines—what he referred to as ‘surprising twists and turns in the plot’, ‘grand sets’ and ‘spectacular mounting’. Moreover, as I argued in earlier chapters, Islamicate worlds were a ploy to appeal to India’s large Muslim audiences of the day, although their appeal was by no means restricted to these communities: the tales offered recognisable motifs that would resonate with the wider Indian audiences’ cultural knowledge and shared fantasies. However, I also suggest, the ‘Arabian Nights fantasy film’ worked with Indian audiences because it was ambiguously coded: it was simultaneously both a refusal of all things Western, and also modern and Western, in tune with global cosmopolitan modernity. Reading across the body of images within the current archive, however, we see that the Orient it peddled was a hybrid of East and West that is more complex than it first appears.

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